The week opens with the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, with the Holy Martyrs Cosmas and Damian commemorated, and proceeds through St Wenceslaus, Michaelmas, St Jerome, St Remigius, the Holy Guardian Angels and St Thérèse of the Child Jesus. It culminates on Sunday, 4 October, not with St Francis, but with the Solemnity of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which in the older Roman calendar is celebrated on the first Sunday of October as a Double of the Second Class. The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost is commemorated. St Francis, whose Double Major feast is impeded by the higher feast of the Rosary, is transferred to Monday, 5 October, with SS. Placid and Companions commemorated.
There are no Ember Days during this week. The September Ember Days according to the older computation were Wednesday 16, Friday 18 and Saturday 19 September.
| Dies | 27 SUN | 28 MON | 29 TUE | 30 WED | 1 THU | 2 FRI | 3 SAT | 4 SUN |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Officium | Dominica XVIII post Pentecosten | S. Wenceslai Ducis et Martyris | In Dedicatione S. Michaëlis Archangeli | S. Hieronymi Presbyteri, Confessoris et Ecclesiæ Doctoris | S. Remigii Episcopi et Confessoris | Ss. Angelorum Custodum | S. Teresiæ a Jesu Infante Virginis | In Solemnitate SS. Rosarii B. Mariæ Virginis |
| CLASSIS | Semiduplex | Semiduplex | Duplex II classis | Duplex | Semiduplex ad lib. / Simplex | Duplex majus | Duplex | Duplex II classis |
| Color* | Viridis | Rubeum | Albus | Albus | Albus | Albus | Albus | Albus |
| MISSA | Da pacem | In virtute | Benedícite | In médio Ecclesiæ | Státuit | Benedícite | Veni de Líbano | Gaudeámus |
| Orationes | 2a Ss. Cosmæ et Damiani; 3a A cunctis | 2a A cunctis; 3a ad libitum | Unica | Unica | 2a A cunctis; 3a ad libitum | Unica | Unica | 2a Dominicæ XIX post Pentecosten |
| NOTAE | Gl.; Cr.; Præf. de Trinitate | Gl.; Præf. communis | Gl.; Cr.; Præf. communis | Gl.; Cr.; Præf. communis | Gl.; Præf. communis | Gl.; Cr.; Præf. communis | Gl.; Præf. communis | Gl.; Cr.; Præf. B.M.V. — Et te in Festivitate; IX Lectio Dominicæ; Ult. Evang. Dominicæ |
| Nota Bene / Vel / Votiva | Ss. Cosmas et Damianus commemorantur. IX Lectio de Sanctis. Ad Vesp. a Capitulo de seq., comm. Dominicæ. | Ad Vesp. de seq., sine comm. præc. | In II Vesp. comm. S. Hieronymi | In II Vesp. comm. S. Remigii | Ad Vesp. de seq.; si S. Remigius ut Semiduplex celebratur, comm. præc. | In II Vesp. comm. S. Teresiæ | I Vesp. SS. Rosarii B.M.V.; comm. S. Teresiæ et Dominicæ XIX post Pentecosten. S. Franciscus cras impeditur et transfertur. | SS. Rosarium præcedit S. Franciscum. Dominica XIX commemoratur. S. Franciscus transfertur ad Fer. II, 5 Oct. In II Vesp. comm. S. Francisci transl., Dominicæ et Ss. Placidi et Soc. Mm. |
* Color: Albus = White; Rubeum = Red; Viridis = Green; Purpura = Purple; Niger = Black.
Sunday, 27 September 2026 — Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost; Commemoration of SS. Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs
The week begins in green with the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost. SS. Cosmas and Damian occur today, but their feast is Semidouble and therefore does not displace the Sunday. They are commemorated, while the Sunday supplies the Office and Mass Da pacem. The Introit asks God to give peace to those who wait upon Him, while the Collect goes immediately to the source of that peace: the human heart cannot please God unless God Himself directs it.
The Gospel is the healing of the paralytic. Its order is deliberate. Before Christ restores the man’s body, He says, “Son, be of good heart, thy sins are forgiven thee.” The scribes understand the implication: the authority claimed is divine. Christ then performs the visible miracle as confirmation of His invisible authority to forgive sins. The crowd glorifies God “who had given such power to men”, words which the Catholic tradition naturally relates to the power of absolution entrusted by Christ to His Church.
SS. Cosmas and Damian form an especially fitting commemoration. Christian tradition remembers them as physicians who exercised their art without demanding payment and who ultimately gave their lives for Christ. Human medicine may restore bodily health; Christ heals the deeper paralysis caused by sin.
At Vespers there is concurrence with St Wenceslaus. According to the older rubric for a Sunday concurring with a following Semidouble feast, Vespers are of the Sunday until the Chapter, thereafter of St Wenceslaus, with commemoration of the Sunday.
Monday, 28 September 2026 — St Wenceslaus, Duke and Martyr
St Wenceslaus belongs to that relatively small company of saints whose holiness was exercised amid the responsibilities of temporal government. Duke of Bohemia in the tenth century, he encouraged the Christianisation of his people, supported the Church and became renowned for personal piety and concern for the poor. His death at Stará Boleslav amid the political struggle involving his brother Boleslaus came to be venerated as martyrdom.
The Mass In virtute places the Christian ruler beneath a higher sovereignty. Authority does not sanctify the man who possesses it; authority itself must be sanctified by obedience to God. Wenceslaus is remembered not because political power made him holy, but because he understood power as something received and therefore answerable to divine law.
This evening St Wenceslaus yields entirely to Michaelmas. First Vespers are of the Dedication of St Michael the Archangel, a Double of the Second Class in the older calendar being followed here, without commemoration of the preceding Semidouble feast.
Tuesday, 29 September 2026 — The Dedication of St Michael the Archangel
Michaelmas is one of the great angelic feasts of the Roman calendar. Its title preserves the dedication of a church in honour of St Michael, while the feast itself came to gather into one solemn observance the Church’s veneration of the Archangel whom Scripture shows contending against the dragon and leading the faithful angels against the rebellion of Satan.
St Michael appears not as a decorative figure of Christian imagination but as the servant of divine sovereignty. His very name — Quis ut Deus?, “Who is like unto God?” — expresses the answer to the primordial temptation. Pride says that the creature may set itself beside its Creator; Michael’s name is the contradiction of that lie. God alone is God, and the blessedness of every creature consists in accepting that truth.
The Mass Benedícite summons the angels themselves to bless the Lord. The Church’s devotion to St Michael is therefore wholly theocentric. We honour him because his fidelity manifests the proper order of creation: strength without self-assertion, majesty without pride, warfare without hatred, and perfect obedience without servility.
In Second Vespers St Jerome is commemorated.
Wednesday, 30 September 2026 — St Jerome, Priest, Confessor and Doctor of the Church
St Jerome stands among the greatest scholars of Christian antiquity. Born at Stridon in the fourth century, educated in the classical tradition, converted to increasingly rigorous Christian discipline and eventually ordained priest, he devoted an extraordinary portion of his life to the study, translation and exposition of Sacred Scripture. His years at Bethlehem became inseparable from the work for which the Latin Church particularly remembers him: the revision and translation of biblical texts which formed the foundation of the Latin Vulgate.
Yet the liturgy does not honour Jerome merely as an accomplished linguist. The Mass In médio Ecclesiæ places him among the Doctors because his learning became service to revealed truth. His scholarship was not an exercise in standing over Scripture as its judge. Languages, manuscripts and exegesis were employed so that the Church might receive more accurately the Word entrusted to her.
Jerome could be combative, impatient and devastatingly direct; sanctity did not make him colourless. What it did was subject his remarkable abilities to the claims of Christ. His feast therefore challenges an age rich in information but often poor in wisdom. Scripture is not mastered merely by possessing data about it. The Word of God is received within the Faith of the Church and under the discipline of conversion.
St Remigius is commemorated at Second Vespers.
Thursday, 1 October 2026 — St Remigius, Bishop and Confessor
St Remigius, Bishop of Reims, belongs to the transition from the collapsing Roman order of Gaul to the Christian civilisation of the Franks. His name is inseparably associated with the conversion and baptism of Clovis, King of the Franks, traditionally placed towards the end of the fifth century. Whatever questions historians continue to discuss concerning the exact chronology, the importance of the conversion of the Frankish monarchy to the subsequent Christian history of Western Europe is beyond dispute.
The older books allow the observance of St Remigius as Semidouble ad libitum, otherwise as Simple. The Mass Státuit presents the bishop as the man appointed by God over His household. Remigius’s importance does not finally lie in proximity to political power, but in using episcopal authority to bring power itself beneath the Gospel.
In the evening the Office passes to the Holy Guardian Angels. Where St Remigius has been observed as Semidouble, he is commemorated in their First Vespers.
Friday, 2 October 2026 — The Holy Guardian Angels
The Feast of the Guardian Angels gives liturgical expression to a doctrine woven throughout Scripture and Christian tradition: divine Providence employs the ministry of angels for the protection and guidance of men. “He hath given his angels charge over thee; to keep thee in all thy ways.” Their guardianship does not replace God’s care but is itself one of the means by which that care is exercised.
The feast also rebukes the modern temptation to imagine the visible world as the whole of reality. Angels are neither metaphors for good impulses nor sentimental inventions devised for children. They are real intellectual creatures, servants of God, participating according to His will in the government of creation.
The Mass again begins Benedícite, calling upon the angels to bless the Lord. Their ministry teaches something profound about genuine service: the Guardian Angel acts continually without demanding recognition from the person guarded. Hidden fidelity is no less real because it remains hidden.
At Second Vespers St Thérèse of the Child Jesus is commemorated.
Saturday, 3 October 2026 — St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Virgin
St Thérèse entered the Carmelite monastery at Lisieux while still very young and died there in 1897 at only twenty-four. Outwardly hers was an extraordinarily restricted life: enclosure, prayer, community duties, illness and an early death. Yet the posthumous publication of her writings revealed the spiritual doctrine which caused her influence to spread throughout the Church with remarkable rapidity.
Her “little way” is sometimes trivialised into mere sweetness. In reality it is a demanding doctrine of supernatural childhood: acknowledgement of one’s littleness, abandonment to divine mercy, fidelity in apparently insignificant duties and confidence that holiness is principally the work of grace rather than self-manufactured greatness. The proper Mass Veni de Líbano presents Thérèse as the bride called by Christ, while its Collect asks that we follow her in humility and simplicity of heart.
The evening concurrence is particularly important. Tomorrow is the first Sunday of October, and therefore, according to the older arrangement, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Double of the Second Class. First Vespers are therefore of the Most Holy Rosary, with commemoration first of St Thérèse and then of the occurring Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
St Francis does not begin tonight. His feast occurs tomorrow but is impeded by the higher feast of the Most Holy Rosary and is consequently transferred to Monday, 5 October.
Sunday, 4 October 2026 — The Solemnity of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Commemoration of the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
The first Sunday of October is occupied in the older Roman calendar by the Solemnity of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated as a Double of the Second Class. The altar is white. The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost is commemorated, while St Francis of Assisi, whose Double Major feast falls on this date, is transferred to the first available day, Monday, 5 October.
The historical position of the feast is important. St Pius V instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory following the Christian victory at Lepanto in 1571; Gregory XIII subsequently associated the observance explicitly with the Rosary and assigned it to the first Sunday of October. Pope Leo XIII, whose pontificate did so much to promote the Rosary, raised the solemnity in 1887 to the rank of Double of the Second Class, and the following year approved its proper Office and Mass. Only with the twentieth-century reforms was the liturgical observance moved away from the first Sunday to a fixed date.
The Mass is Gaudeámus. Because the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost is impeded rather than erased, it is commemorated in the Mass. The Creed is said, the Preface is of the Blessed Virgin Mary with Et te in Festivitate, and the Gospel of the Sunday is read as the Last Gospel. At Matins the ninth lesson is taken from the Sunday Homily.
The Rosary itself is no decorative Marian devotion appended to the Faith. It is a disciplined contemplation of the mysteries of Christ in company with His Mother. The Annunciation, Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, Ascension and the other mysteries are not abstractions; they are the concrete acts by which our salvation was accomplished. The beads prevent prayer from becoming merely spontaneous self-expression. Again and again the mind is brought back to what God has done.
That point acquires particular force when the feast occupies a Sunday. The Rosary does not compete with the mysteries proclaimed in the Church’s public worship. It forms the Christian imagination so that those mysteries may be contemplated more deeply. The repeated Ave Maria is ordered towards its centre: “blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Genuine Marian devotion is therefore always Christological.
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost remains present beneath the feast. Its Gospel, the parable of the marriage feast, speaks of the divine invitation and of the wedding garment required of the guest. The mysteries contemplated in the Rosary reveal both the generosity of that invitation and its cost: God has acted for our salvation, but grace calls for conversion rather than passive admiration.
At Second Vespers the Office remains of the Most Holy Rosary. St Francis, transferred to the following day, is commemorated; the occurring Sunday is likewise commemorated, followed by SS. Placid and Companions, whose Simple feast falls on 5 October.
Monday, 5 October 2026 — St Francis of Assisi, Confessor, transferred; Commemoration of SS. Placid and Companions, Martyrs
Although outside the strict limits of this week’s table, the transfer must be stated to complete the occurrence properly. St Francis of Assisi is celebrated on Monday, 5 October, his Double Major feast having been impeded on its proper date by the Double of the Second Class Solemnity of the Most Holy Rosary.
SS. Placid and Companions, whose Simple feast belongs to 5 October, do not obstruct the transfer. They are commemorated.
The Mass is Mihi autem. Its opening words provide the key to Francis: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Franciscan poverty is unintelligible if reduced to a social programme or admiration for simplicity. Francis renounced possession because he sought a more radical possession by Christ.
The transfer is therefore liturgically apt in its own way. Sunday has contemplated the mysteries of Christ through the Rosary; Monday presents a saint whose vocation consisted in allowing those mysteries, above all the poverty and Passion of Christ, to take visible form in a human life.
At Second Vespers St Bruno, whose Double feast follows on 6 October, is commemorated.
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